The Ethic of Slow Methods and Refusals: Leaning Into Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous Relationalities

• In Event: Methodological Commitments and Refusals: Engaging Slow Methodology With Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous Communities

Abstract

Objectives or purposes

This paper documents the engagements between the authors as they deepened their methodological commitments and refusals during the Covid-19 pandemic through understandings of slow as method. Their work centres a decolonial feminist lens as they lean into slow methods for Black, Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous relationalities and extend this to an ethic of care between themselves and their participants.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework

Erica Violet Lee (2021), a nēhiyaw (Plains Cree) poet and community organizer, emphasizes the meaning-making and ‘worlding’ ways in which Black, Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous women can meaningfully show up for each other and actively reject the violent approaches of white supremacist systems that try to pit us against each other. Our work offers a refusal and centres relational ways of living, working and organizing together. As Lee (2021) stated: “I want to move through the world in a way that acknowledges Black women as the originators of so much freedom work without undoing our existences as Black and Native women to a harmful and impossible comparative study” (para. 28). The celebrations of Black and Indigenous maternal traditions and kinship relations often reflect how matriarchy exists within our communities and how women take up roles and responsibilities related to raising up our future generations. This radical and intergenerational love is central to our understandings of the ethic of slow methods and refusals.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry

This conceptual paper documents our journey together with two different projects. The first, was guided by Indigenous Maternal Methodologies (Author, 2017) to convene sharing circles that honour Indigenous storytelling methods (Fitznor, 2012; Smith, 2021). The second, involved engagement with writings on Black, Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous feminist solidarities. For this particular paper we lean into a genealogical body of decolonial feminist literature to situate our researcher reflections on pausing and slowing our work during the Covid-19 pandemic amidst moments of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous violence. We situate our methodological commitments and refusals within the legacies or writings that transcend past-present-future continuums and shape our conceptions of time, place, and space.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials

Our work extends an intergenerational legacy of feminist genealogy that provides a bridge for us to dream and imagine Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous feminist solidarities. Our work is also guided by the affirming moments we both experienced during this process— in conversations and in dreams. Thus from our ontological orientations, our data sources include: spirit, vision and dreams. Our work is also guided by the enduring presence of Black, Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous relationality that simultaneously resists anti-Blackness and settler colonial logics

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work

Centering Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous feminist solidarities is about bringing the issues that matter in our communities, families and daily lives into academic spaces and bringing the knowledge we gain in academia back to our communities. The commitment to embracing slow methods is a refusal to rush outcomes of our relational work and to take the time required to commit to deep listening.

Authors

• Jennifer Brant, University of Toronto - OISE
  Presenting Author

• Kayla Webber, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author